Fraudulent Research = Bad Policy

“Researchers” upon whose “findings” firearms policy is often based, have been lying to us for decades. I came across an interesting blog entry. The author calls it A Brief History of Firearms Policy Fraud. A short quote:

“… I described this pattern as “fraud” before the jump because the magnitude of these errors would be too great and their direction too consistent for honest error, even if we did not in several prominent cases have direct evidence that the fraud must have been intended.

“A further and very disturbing pattern is that conventional academic peer review has largely failed to point out errors that were later readily apparent to uncredentialed amateurs.”

There have been many, many studies on guns and crime. Most of them “cherry-pick” the data to get the results they set out to find. They intentionally ignore factors that would tend to skew results away from the desired outcome. They set out to make a point and — surprise! — they get it.

To this day, the best research on guns and crime, controlled for some 5000 variables, accounting for every county in the USA over a period of 11 years (not ‘cherry-picked’ data) is “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws” by John R. Lott Jr. It proves a definite link between gun control and crime and that it is a cause-and-effect relationship. That is, where the most gun control exists, crime is highest. In areas with the fewest restrictions on gun possession and carrying, crime is lowest. Now you might be tempted to say: “Sure, when crime goes up, gun control is imposed. Of course there’s a correlation!” But that’s not the way it works.

Time and again, where gun rights are restricted, increases in violent crime follow. Policy-makers then respond with more restrictions. Despite common sense and evidence to the contrary, they fervently believe that guns cause crime and that if they could just rid us of guns, those gang members and drug dealers, rapists and robbers would find honest work and go straight. As if.

The reason these frauds are able to get away with it is that so many people want it to be so. After all, if guns cause crime, then we can do something about crime. But if crime in fact results from a complex mish-mash of socio-economic and cultural factors, it become much harder to deal with. So, policy makers want, very much, to believe that guns cause crime.

Firearms policy (‘gun control’) is one of those curious areas where the people who know the least about guns seem to wield the most influence. Many anti-gun crusaders proudly state that they have never even held a gun, much less fired one and they certainly wouldn’t own one.

Then there are the hypocrites that own guns themselves, even have concealed carry permits, but think that you and I shouldn’t have guns. It’s a class thing; the lower classes can’t be trusted with guns. They’ll just use them to rob and kill upper-class citizens, respectable folk like themselves.

In my years as a gun rights activist, one thing I’ve noticed is that the anti-rights folks are quicker to resort to violence than are we gun nuts. The arm-chair psychologist in me says these folks are projecting their own poor impulse control into the rest of the population.

This is why they are constantly predicting “blood in the streets” and saying that “every traffic altercation will turn into a shooting, if people are allowed to be armed.” When concealed carry legislation is proposed, they can be counted on to predict gunfights on every street corner, and they are regularly proved wrong (and are doubtless disappointed) when concealed carry is implemented and there is no resulting crime wave.

Strangely, the fact that they are time and again proved wrong does not make them reexamine their beliefs. Instead, they commission a study to prove that guns cause crime and, to no one’s surprise, the data chosen support their hypothesis. How ’bout that!